Barron McCann’s ‘Validate’ finds an extra £60,000 per year for charity fundraisers Wesser Ltd
Charity fundraising organisation Wesser Ltd is now raising an additional £60,000 per year for good causes, following the implementation of a new real-time electronic payment data validation tool from leading payment processing systems and IT services specialist, Barron McCann.
Most of Wesser’s fundraising activity is of the ‘door-to-door’ type, where representatives will take direct debit pledges and complete the necessary mandate forms while on the doorstep. However, with up to 5,000 new records passing through Wesser’s fundraisers and office support team every month, the company was seeing up to 50 of their submitted mandates being rejected each week, meaning that in most cases, these pledges simply had to be disregarded – representing up to £60k of lost revenue each year.
The use of Barron McCann’s ‘Validate’ – which Wesser accesses via an online portal - enables the company to perform quick and easy verification of UK domestic and European payment data such as account numbers, credit card numbers, BICs, and IBANs and gives them the ability to spot errors at source, before the mandates are submitted into the banking system where costly rejection fees could be incurred. Validate can also be used to ‘ID check’ individuals, while giving access to a rich stream of company information including access to accounts and director’s reports.
According to UK payments authority APACS, the cost of resolving failed direct debit payments is estimated to be as much as £35 per transaction, costing UK businesses up to £3bn annually. Error rates in bank account details at the point of capture, where bank account validation has not taken place, can be as high as 8%, resulting in rejected payments that can have a direct impact on administration costs and customer service.
According to Wesser’s Operations Manager Kelvin Hopkins, one of the biggest benefits that Validate offers in practice is the ability to recover funds from pledges that would previously have been disregarded and abandoned. Accepting that the process of data capture inevitably creates errors, Validate enables Wesser to identify the errors and have them corrected in a matter of days.
“From a fundraising point of view, Validate has given us access to around £60,000-worth of donations annually which we would have otherwise have had to walk away from,” commented Hopkins. “However, if you add to this the reduction in administration time spent chasing returned mandates and the lower costs through a reduction in bank penalties then the real saving is probably higher still.”
About Wesser
Originally founded in Germany in 1968, Wesser is now one of Europe's leading charity fundraising organisations, raising money for charities with a combined annual income of £150 million. Wesser Ltd was established in the UK in 1998 and works exclusively in partnership with St John Ambulance, the UK's leading provider of first aid. Wesser has a target to raise over £12 million for this charity before the end of 2010. For further information, see www.wesser.co.uk
About Barron McCann Technology
Barron McCann Technology has a 20-year track record in information security, IT services and secure payment systems. The company’s product and service offerings include X-Kryptor, a market-leading dynamic VPN product range offering Government-approved, high level security facilities; PayGate, a secure payment solution; Validate, a secure transaction validation system; e-Post, an electronic document exchange system and Secure Data Services – a portfolio of services providing a complete solution to the secure management and destruction of optical, magnetic and printed data up to and including HM Government ‘Top Secret’ (IL6) level.
Barron McCann Technology Ltd is based at Bemac House, Fifth Avenue, Letchworth, Herts, SG6 2HF.
Media enquiries:
Andrew Smith - 07887 800867
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